Schools been going really great here and I wanted to share how we are doing History that has made it COME ALIVE for my daughters and myself. I'll share step-by-step...

1.) Consider your topic. For demonstration purposes I'll be using the Civil Rights Movement & the Great Depression. Give your children a bried description of what you'll be studying. TruthQuest History has these types of summeries in their curriculum or you can just read from a good book from the library.

2.) Select a spine book that is fun to work through. This will help you to choose your topics as your starting points. While you are studying, you'll find that new topics will emerge from other books. Feel free to go where your child's interests lie. My spines are:

Another book that really brought the Great Depression alive was this title. It is full of 1st hand accounts from the people who lived during that time. It was published by Reiman publishing, the same who produce Country Woman Magazine & Reminse Magazine. Here is a picture of the book:

3. Only plan for week one because you'll want to keep this open to your child's interests. Purchase a project board (aka science presentation board). Your child will be putting mini-reports, pictures, timelines etc... on this board. I recommend starting with a timeline. In the civil rights book above, we just copied the dates/events from the timeline in this book. We pasted a long skinny piece of colored paper along the bottom of the board, added computer printed dates and then added timeline figures. We got most of our figures from google images. It is OK if you have no idea what the topic is that you are pasting down. As you go through your study, you'll learn about these events.

4. Request quite a few living books (books written in story form) & easy non-fiction books from your library. You won't read them all, but it will give you a good selection to work through. We requested topic specific books such as:

Civil Rights Movement	Great Depression
Rosa Parks	Dust Bowl
Brown vrs. Brown	Life in the Great Depression Era
Little Rock Nine	Wall Street Crash

 4. You'll also want to start searching for age appropriate movies for your children. You can use documentaries or hollywood version (make sure they are accurate) but the hollywood versions will really bring it alive for your student. There could be some inaccuracies, and your student should check the movie against books on the subject. For our studies we watched:

We also saw a play about Rosa Parks at our local theatre. We weren't able to find any good video's about the Great Depression other than:

5. Now that your child is excited, it is time to start digging deep. Read books and work on projects. Get creative with this. My daughters did some of the following:

• My older daughter is studying the 1930's, so she made a pretend radio out of carboard to look like a tombstone radio from the 30's and she checked out radio broadcast tapes of the 30's from the library to be played by a real radio inside the fake radio, making it appear that the fake 30's radio was really playing.

• They both wrote biographies of people and events. They printed them out on white paper, added a background paper and added REAL pictures & drawn pictues of the events/people.

• One daughter make "lift the flap" type projects.

• Your child could make a powerpoint presentation or show a clip of the person in action. For instance, my daughter checked out Martin Luther King Jr's I HAVE A DREAM DVD from the library to have playing during the presentation.

• Have your child memorize speeches, poems etc.. for presenting.

6. At the end of your unit, plan to have a Unit celebration. Invite family and friends over. Have foods from the era available. Have your children wear costumes and set up their presentation boards. Have FUN!

Michelle

PS Next year we are going with TruthQuest History over Tapestry of Grace because all I really need is a good booklist and I can't justfiy the cost of Tapestry of Grace for a good booklist.

PPS I'll post pictures of our current History Study & Projects as soon as were done next week.